by Arthur Lizie (Music 781.66 Beck)
Though he started out as more of a folk musician, Beck Hansen, more commonly known just as Beck, became popular for his blend of Americana roots music with electronic and hip hop sounds, exemplified by his first hit “Loser” in 1994, which became something of a Generation X slacker anthem. But a slacker he was not: Beck went on to produce music in a wide range of styles, including lots of pop music forms and several albums of folk music and ballads. His 14th album, “Hyperspace,” came out in 2019. Despite all of this music, there hasn’t been a lot written about Beck’s music to date. There is a very cool book that’s long out of print called “Playing with Matches” that is about Beck and his grandfather Al Hansen, who was a long-time artist associated with the Fluxus movement. I remember really enjoying that book back in my music school undergraduate days, as Beck’s contributions to it help to explain the conceptual underpinnings throughout his work up to that point in the late 90s. But since then, it’s been literary silence.
Fortunately, we recently got a
great new book in Polley called Beck: Every Album, Every Song by Arthur Lizie, and
as the title suggests, it provides a nice critical examination of all of his
records throughout his career. While the books in this series from Sonicbond
Publishing aren’t biographies—author Lizie explicitly states that he avoids
talking about Beck’s personal life in this book — the granular look at every
record in a given artist’s discography does provide a lot of insight into their
work. After a very brief introduction that covers the most essential background
information about Beck’s early life and family — of note is his grandfather Al
Hanson as mentioned earlier, and that his father David Campbell was also
heavily involved in the music industry as a musician and arranger — Lizie jumps
right into the core business of this book, which is taking apart every Beck
studio album song by song. For readers who weren’t Beck superfans during his
heyday in the 90s, you may be off to some surprises right at the beginning, as
Beck released several lesser-known albums before his breakthrough “Mellow Gold”
record. In fact, the year that “Mellow Gold” was released, three other
folk-oriented records came out as well: “A Western Harvest Field by Moonlight,”
“Stereopathic Soulmanure,” and “One Foot in the Grave.” However, Beck drew from
these less polished albums for B-sides: those who bought his biggest single
“Loser” sometimes got versions featuring the song “Totally Confused” from “A
Western Harvest Field” as one of the B-sides (along with “MTV Makes Me Want to
Smoke Crack” from the 1993 album “Golden Feelings”), while “One Foot in the
Grave” from the “Stereopathic Soulmanure” album became a regular part of his
live sets, “one of his top-10 most performed songs” according to the author.
The song-by-song analysis in this
book (as well as other books in this series) is fairly thorough. Most songs
just get short mini-reviews of a sentence or two, while others that were more
popular or that have known anecdotes connected to them sometimes include a few
paragraphs up to a page of information. For folks who are completists, each
album also features “related tracks” after the contents of the main album
releases. These are often B-sides included with singles from the associated
album, but other times they’re tracks that appeared on other compilation albums
contemporaneously. For some of Beck’s early main albums, there are pages of
these related tracks, and many are described as being just as interesting as
primary album cuts. Having come across many of these songs over the years
myself, I agree—some of Beck’s best work, especially in the 90s, was spread
across lots of B-sides. He was incredibly prolific in those years, also drawing
from songs that he’d written back to the mid-1980s, and as a rare mainstream
artist to embrace various forms of recording at home from the earliest parts of
his career, he turned out lots of interesting recordings.
Entries for each album begin with a
short synopsis of the circumstances of their production, business machinations
behind their release, and how they were received commercially and critically.
From the earliest parts of his career, a kind of conceptual dichotomy becomes
obvious in these descriptions: while Beck’s “main” albums released by major
labels obviously do better in the commercial marketplace, he also receives some
criticism for his tendencies toward satire and comedy. At the same time, while
his “folk” albums on smaller labels certainly have their moments of levity, his
strong songwriting and sense of balladry and lyrical insight seem more
accessible to the critics on these less-produced outings. Even on his most raw
recordings, he receives accolades from critics and other musicians for his
harmonic intuition and a willingness to explore sadness in these songs, when
“silly” and “surreal” applied more to his major label efforts.
Beck’s major-label albums of the
90s also included lots of samples, and Lizie does a great job of describing
their origins and how they become important elements of the music. As an
aficionado of Americana music, sometimes Beck’s borrowing from other elements
of music is less literal than sampling, too, more in the tradition of jazz
where artists have long built on familiar songs and turned them into new
things. We see this in Beck’s discography in songs like “Girl Dreams” and “He’s
a Mighty Good Leader” on “One Foot in the Grave,” building on songs by the
Carter Family and Skip James, respectively, or even conceptually on songs like
the hit single “Devil’s Haircut” that leads off his most commercially
successful album “Odelay,” in which some of his imagery is inspired by the old
“Stagger Lee” family of folk tunes.
Post-“Odelay,” the split between
Beck’s previous commercial and folk songs starts to become less apparent. The
“Mutations” album, for example, dropping between the major albums “Odelay” and
“Midnite Vultures,” has more of a singer-songwriter feel than the records
surrounding it, yet it’s considerably more cohesive than the earlier folk
albums, and was tracked with his whole touring band in tow. And after “Midnite
Vultures,” Beck released what many critics consider to be his best album,
2002’s “Sea Change,” which is a full album of very sad breakup songs, but very
intricately produced like his other major-label records. Later records
continued to combine Beck’s interests more coherently, too, gradually taking
his overall style toward a modern pop sound. Although Beck’s level of fame
seemed to level off and decline after the “Sea Change” era, Lizie faithfully
documents all of the following albums, too, up to the current more recent
release, “Hyperspace” from 2019. And he does a good job here—to be honest, I
don’t think I’d find enough to say about some of the more recent Beck albums
like “Modern Guilt” from 2008. His descriptions of the songs have me
reconsidering a few of the albums that didn’t do much for me upon release, the
sign of a good book.
At the end of the
book, there are a few short sections that document Beck’s early recordings,
mostly cassette demos that eventually found their way to the internet,
compilations and live collections, some collaborations with other artists, and
his work with other artists as songwriter, producer, or remixer. There are some
other collaborations strewn throughout the book, too, primarily guest vocal
appearances with other artists that are documented next to the Beck albums near
the same release date. Ultimately, it’s a lot of data to wade through, probably
not the ultimate format for attracting folks who aren’t superfans of an artist
to get into a book, but for record collectors or ardent fans, there’s good
stuff to find here, and good inferences to make about this body of work by
considering it in total.
Overall, I think the data is pretty
solid, too, though I did see at least one omission in the notes about the
“Guero” album that made me consider the sources used in putting this together:
Brad Breeck, a composer known these days for his music for “Gravity Falls” (and
a fella I went to school with), did sound design for that album, and is listed
on physical copies, but is apparently overlooked on the web resources used to
gather all this information. So be aware that there could be the occasional
detail missing. And though it wasn’t formally a recording, I was disappointed
that there isn’t much said about “Song Reader,” Beck’s “album” from 2012 that
consisted of sheet music of a new batch of songs rather than making a recording
of them himself. As a music librarian, that’s an especially interesting project
to me — this is how music was distributed before recording technology, after
all — and I would count it as an album, albeit an unconventional one today.
Those issues aside, if you’re hungry for reading about Beck, Every Album, Every Song will at least serve as a
good appetizer until someone writes a solid biography.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Lived Through That: 90s Musicians Today by Mike Hipple, or Now is the Time To Invent!: Reports from the Indie Rock
Revolution, 1986-2000 by Steve Connell.)
( official Beck web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment